Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.com From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Global Cultural Prototype Message-ID: <1493@intercon.com> Date: 16 Oct 89 15:07:07 GMT References: <3366@ccnysci.UUCP> <2145@avsd.UUCP> <18291@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <1989Oct13.142526.13122@uncecs.edu> <1489@intercon.com> <1989Oct15.142457.9248@uncecs.edu> Sender: news@intercon.com Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation Lines: 56 First of all, thanks for answering my questions about Esperanto--they were not meant rhetorically (although, in hindsight, they probably sounded that way). In article <1989Oct15.142457.9248@uncecs.edu>, dgary@uncecs.edu (D Gary Grady) writes: > "Conscious design" is > characteristic to some extent of any language with prescriptive > dictionaries or an "academy." I might note that insisting on these > presumed "natural" attributes is arbitrary to begin with. Sigh. I'll be a little blunt here. Prescription, whether of grammar, vocabulary, or usage, is a crock. Even at best, formal descriptions of language of any sort are *descriptive* approximations to how people actually use language. To take an example besides Esperanto: L'Academie Francaise, for all their wishes to "keep French pure," have nothing to say about French usage. The best they can do is to exercise *political* power in an attempt to do so, but despite these efforts, "le parking" or "les jeans" are just as French as "l'Arc de Triomphe." Language, while it can be affected by legislation, is not something that can be prescribed itself. > Being an empiricist at heart, I can't help noting that theoretical > objections to Esperanto must somehow deal with the numbers of linguists, > poets, etc, - people who are presumably qualified to judge the merits of > a language and its usability - who have pronounced it a "real" and > expressive language. (For example, the current head of the Universala > Esperanto Asocio is a linguist at the University of London, and his > predecessor is a former professor of English literature now an American > university president.) Well, I'll make a couple remarks, which perhaps you can address. The first is simply that I'm not saying Esperanto is a bad thing. In fact, I think it could be lots of fun as recreation, especially for anyone with interests in linguistics. It's as far as I know the most complete attempt to "build" a language, and as such it is interesting and useful in its own right. I just claim that it is not in the same class as languages that have developed historically, despite the fact that it shares many of their characteristics. The second is more of a challenge: association does not necessarily imply endorsement, and linguists tend to be just as specialized as any other scientists. If you could supply some quotes or references, I would appreciate it. I can say that I've seen no mention of Esperanto in any of the liguistics journals that I read from time to time... > I could be wrong, but this seems to me a rather firm decision to reach > based on what strike me as a set of misconceptions. If I'm mistaken and > you do know something about Esperanto please correct me. I don't know much about Esperanto. I do know a fair amount about language in general. -- Amanda Walker "Tobacco is the only drug in America that will kill you if it's taken as directed." --Dr. C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General